Learning vocabulary: Recording vocabulary

When you meet new vocabulary, you need to use various techniques to help
yourself remember the word.

First, though, you need to decide how important the word is for you and your
subject. For some words it is enough to know just enough about a word so you
can understand it when you hear or see it used in context. For other words,
though, that you will need to use productively you will need as much information
as possible about the words. In that case you may need to remember:

Another way is to use word cards. Typically you would have one word per card
- write the word on one side and the meaning and other information on the other.
Study your words regularly - look at the side with the word written on and see
if you can remember what is on the other side.

Pronunciation

You will need to know the pronunciation of the word - how to pronounce it
- and record it accurately. The English alphabet is not always very useful to
indicate how to pronounce a word, so you will need to know how to use and understand
the IPA symbols.

For example:

"medical" is pronounced ,
"horses" is pronounced
and "economics" is pronounced .

Spelling

The spelling of the word - how to spell it - is very important. A good dictionary
can help you. For more information, try: Writing:
Spelling. It is important to be aware of differences between UK and USA
spelling and to be consistent in your use.

Grammar

It is necessary to include grammatical information about the word: whether
the word is a noun, verb, adjective, adverb etc. Use abbreviation: N, V, Adj,
Adv

For example:

"economy" is a noun, "economic"
is an adjective and "economise" is
a verb.

economy (N)

economic (Adj)

economise (V)

If the word is a verb, you need to be able to remember any irregular forms.
If it is a noun, you need to know whether it is countable or uncountable and
if it has an irregular plural. It is also useful to record typical patterns
which the word occurs in. This includes, for example, which prepositions follow
a particular verb and which nouns in which places can be associated with a particular
verb.

For example, the word "accuse" is
typically used by law students as follows:

Frequency

It is useful to record the common words for your subjects. There are many
words in English with similar means but sometimes you will find that one of
the words is used more frequently than the others. For example:

Connotations

Apart from the basic, dictionary, meaning, words have other meanings. For
example, a word may be a positive or negative word? These are different in different
languages so it is important to know the associations that a word may have in
English.

For example:

a social science student, writing about people without permanent homes
needs to remember that "vagrant"
has negative connotations, compared with "homeless".

an HRM student, writing about discrimination legislation will need to
be careful about using words such as "handicapped",
"black", "blind",
etc.

vagrant = -ve; homeless = +ve

Example

It is always useful to record example sentences. For example, if you are
trying to remember the word "emphasis",
a sentence like the following will help you:

e.g. The decision shows
a new emphasis placed on the environment by Brian Mawhinney, Secretary
of state for transport.